Adam Boulton - Woodsman

My story started in 2013 during a sponsored hike through the Grand Canyon. I had always been a great lover of the outdoor world and talking to our guides in Arizona really opened up a new world to me. Wandering through the wilderness, having that in depth, intimate knowledge of the area just blew me away and as I asked them how I could go about doing it for a living as well they all answered with the same sentiment; ‘I just sort of fell into this job’.
Once I returned to the UK I sought out a way to make this dream a reality and to my horror discovered that the UK really has no wilderness anymore. Centuries of constant human intervention had left nearly every square inch of the UK either in private hands or had been developed into agriculture, industrial, residential or public use land. The more I learned the more I wanted to do something about it, and to help restore some of the UK’s lost wonder.

I undertook training in bush craft and learned how primitive humans first made their impact on the British landscape around 8000 years ago, I greedily sought books and websites to learn the natural history of our land and at the age of 25 I took the plunge and decided to go back to college to study in countryside management, ecology and conservation. Due to my age I had to pay my own way and postponed my life’s plans to pursue a cause I felt was worthwhile and worth devoting myself too. It was during this time I learned the truth about the natural state of the UK and just how overdeveloped, overpopulated and just how ransacked our natural environment had been. It was a real eye opener and it seemed for a good while that everything I learned bought about a new way of seeing how destructive humanity has become. Once I left college I pursed careers in conservation, rewilding and other methods of ecological and environmental work as well as volunteering several national bodies and found my efforts were thwarted by the British population’s lack of environmental and historical knowledge, the nation’s laws and legislation and of course the problem of overpopulation only exacerbating the stresses on the land.

After working for a while as an assistant ranger at one of the country’s largest recreational forests my contract came to an end suddenly. I went self employed as a wildlife gardener, working to make people’s gardens more ecologically friendly and better for the remnants of wildlife that depend on these diminishing spaces. Sadly, this didn’t work out as a viable way of supporting myself but it was through the help of former colleagues and my interest in history I managed to secure some work as a voluntary woodsman, coppicing woodland for the benefit of humans and wildlife alike. I had decided long ago that I wanted to own an area of woodland one day and the combination on this dream, my brief background as a carpenter, my knowledge of history, bushcraft and of ecology led me into the work of being a woodsman perfectly.

I now work on a part time basis coppicing trees and traditionally handcrafting products to sell at car boot sales, markets and other events. If you wish to speak to me about woodland you own or is in need of work, please feel free to contact me as I am always looking to increase my workload so that one day I might realize my dream of making a living off of my own woodland.